125 years of Canadian literature

125 Years of Canadian Literature
at Queen's UniversitySeptember 1 - October 31, 2013

Introduction

F.H. Varley, Dean James Cappon

This year marks the 125th anniversary of the appointment of James Cappon to the first Chair in English at Queen's University. To celebrate this milestone, the Department of English, the W.D.Jordan Special Collections and Music Library and Queen's University Archives offer a retrospective on the complex intersections of scholarship, creativity, and stewardship that have defined the role of Queen's and its faculty in the history of Canadian literature.

This exhibit has been assembled to celebrate the 125th anniversary—the quasquicentennial—of the
founding of the Department of English with the appointment of James Cappon to the first Chair in
English at Queen’s in 1888. Throughout its history the Department has been home to specialists in
literature from a variety of periods and places; however, it has played an especially important
role in establishing Canadian Literature as a central aspect of Canadian culture and as a subject
of study. The materials on display have been selected to illustrate that history—they offer just a
glimpse of the extraordinary resources for the study of Canadian literature housed in the Queen’s
University Archives and in Special Collections. As we prepared each part of the display it became
clear that the subject of every individual case might merit an entire exhibit of its own: indeed,
the story of those authors and poets who themselves create Canadian literature could fill this
space three times over. Our apologies to those writers, both living and dead, whose works have
been omitted from this retrospective because of the limits imposed by space—we hope to tell your
story more fully another day. The exhibit is centred at the W.D. Jordan Library, with auxiliary
cases on the main floor of Stauffer Library.

Display Cases

This retrospective begins with the story of James Cappon, a Scot who was rather controversially
appointed as the first Chair of English over the leading Canadian candidate for the position, the
writer and scholar Sir Charles G.D. Roberts. Cappon would go on to become the first Dean of Arts
and one of Robert Charles Wallace's "Great Men of Queen's"—an administrator who played a key role
in the development of Extension Learning in the 1920s, and in championing the role of the
Humanities as the foundation of a university education. He would also write the first important
critical studies of Roberts and his contemporary, Bliss Carman, and teach the first course devoted
entirely to Canadian literature at Queen's in 1915.

The second case of the exhibit explores the conflicted relationship between James Cappon and his
student Lorne Pierce, a young Methodist minister-in-training who was passionately devoted both to
Queen’s and to establishing the cultural identity of Canada as a modern nation. Chagrined by his
professor’s avowed low opinion of Canadian literature in 1912, Pierce would later become a driving
force in the publication of works by Canadian authors and their critical appraisal through his
role as editor at Ryerson Press from 1920-1960. His collection of Canadiana, donated to coincide
with the opening of the Douglas Library in 1924 and augmented throughout his lifetime, forms the
core of the Edith and Lorne Pierce Collection. Among his lasting contributions to Canadian letters
was his creation of the series Makers of Canadian Literature, slim volumes that combined critical
analysis of early Canadian writers with a selection of their work. He solicited Cappon, his old
antagonist regarding the calibre of Canadian Literature, to write the volume on Charles G.D.
Roberts.

Lorne Pierce's commitment to Canadian literature, both as creative endeavour and as object of
literary study, was affirmed in 1924 when he proposed to the Royal Society of Canada that a medal
be awarded annually recognizing "an achievement of special significance and conspicuous merit in
imaginative or critical literature written in either English or French." Pierce provided the funds
necessary to sustain the award, which the Society subsequently named in his honour. The first
recipient of the medal in 1926 should come as no surprise in this narrative: Charles G. D.
Roberts. In 1964 the Royal Society changed to awarding the medal every second year.

If the first stage in recognizing the cultural importance of Canadian literature was writing its
history, the second was surely providing affordable editions so that it might be taught as a
subject in Canadian universities and schools. The third case highlights the contributions of
Malcolm Ross, general editor of the New Canadian Library, a series of inexpensive editions of
classic Canadian novels. Ross, who served as Head of the Department of English (1957-1960), was
also the first scholar to hold the Cappon Chair, an honour created in 1960 to recognize
extraordinary contributions to research within the Department. A number of members of the
Department edited volumes in this series, and the on-going scholarly editing of Canadian literary
texts remains a key contribution to the field.

Nowhere has the contribution to Canadian literature at Queen's been more striking and more
sustained than in the steady creation of literary works by both faculty members and their
students. In 1955 George Whalley, himself a poet/scholar, organized a conference that would be
recognized as a turning point in the history of Canadian literature. “The Writer, His Media and
the Public" attracted the leading writers and critics of the day and concluded with a series of
recommendations that would not only support the concept of the New Canadian Library but also call
for sustained attention to the teaching of Canadian Literature as a legitimate object of critical
study in Canadian universities and schools. Whalley was known for fostering creative writers at
Queen's, a reputation that encouraged a young Michael Ondaatje to pursue his Master's degree in
Kingston under Whalley's supervision rather than in Toronto with Northrup Frye. The late 60s and
early 70s were a heyday of creative productivity, with the founding of Quarry Press by three
writers from the Department of English, and the development of Quarry from its beginnings as a
student magazine to a nationally respected literary quarterly. The creative tradition continues
with the work of faculty members from both English and Drama, and with the extraordinary
creativity of our alumni writers.

The heart of any academic department is scholarship, and here too members of the Department of
English have contributed to the complex conversation regarding Canadian Literature. An exhibit of
this small scale can only sketch in broad strokes the outline of the history of scholarship in
this field developed by faculty members at Queen's, but their role has been at times pivotal. If
Pierce and Ross pursued emphatically the idea of a national literature, subsequent scholars have
debated the question with equal enthusiasm. From the contextualizing of Canadian writing as
Commonwealth Literature in the work of John Matthews, through the Post-Colonial readings developed
by his many doctoral students, to the rise of an Indigenous Studies that challenges the very idea
of national boundaries, scholars at Queen's have debated, contested, and redefined the very
concept of Canadian Literature.

The commitment of the Department of English to Canadian Literature has been affirmed through the
development of the Giller Event as a capstone experience for the graduating class. Each year,
through the generosity of our alumni, students are provided with a copy of that year's
Scotiabank-Giller prizewinning novel, then given the opportunity to meet with the author on
campus. Since its inception in 2006, the event has brought each recipient of the Giller to
Queen's, providing an opportunity for both students and the wider Kingston community to experience
first-hand contemporary Canadian authors.

in the shape of the gown worn by Muriel Waterhouse, at the time of her graduation from Queen's,
with a B.A. in English, at Spring 1919 Convocation. At the time it was a tradition at the
University, among female graduands in particular, to have classmates and fellow graduates
autograph the sleeves of the gown. Perhaps she studied with Wilhelmina Gordon, the first female
member of the English Department—or perhaps with Cappon, who taught a course in Canadian
Literature from 1915-1919. Muriel's gown was generously donated to Queen's University Archives by
her daughter, Margaret McKay-Clement, herself a graduate of Queen's (B.A. '50).

In 1981 a
generous gift from alumnus J.R. Strathy mandated the creation of the Unit that bears his name,
whose mission is to study standard English usage in Canadian speech and writing. The corpus on
which this study is based includes, among other sources, the work of several Canadian authors who
gave permission for their fictional and nonfictional texts to be entered into the database. The
Strathy Language Unit has produced two editions of the Guide to Canadian English Usage as well as
two paper series; established the Strathy Corpus of Canadian English; collaborated in projects
such as the Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles.

Welcoming you to the exhibit, this case contains smaller
broadsides from Quarry Press featuring the work of Bill Barnes, Tom Marshall, David Helwig, and
Gail Fox, as well as criticism by a range of specialists in Canadian and Indigenous Literature
from the Department of English.

This introduction to the exhibit
emphasizes the variety of contributions made by members of the Department of English to Canadian
Literature, ranging from a selection of the poetry produced by George Herbert Clarke and George
Whalley, two influential scholar poets who became Heads of the department, to recent work by Laura
Murray on Canadian Copyright.

Faculty and
students of the Department of English played a key role in founding Quarry Press. In the mid ‘60s
Tom Eadie (B.A 1968, M.A. 1971) was the editor of Quarry, an annual student-run literary magazine
that was transformed under his editorship into a quarterly literary review publishing work from
writers across Canada. In 1965 Eadie and faculty members Tom Marshall and Colin Norman founded
Quarry Press, its first imprint The Beast With Three Backs, a collection of poems by the three
publishers. In succeeding decades Quarry would become a key imprint for a new generation of
Canadian writers, producing not just beautifully bound volumes but also a number of vibrant
broadsides that capture the aesthetic of that time.